This is one of my favourite dives in the St John’s area, simply because it is usually easy with little current and also because the numerous pinnacles and coral gardens are absolutely superb.
The plan is to jump off the back of the boat and then gently fin around the garden until we get sown to either our air or time limit.
Typical of the pillars is the above and you can work out the
scale from the divers in the photo. The pillars themselves are covered with mainly hard corals and more fish than you can believe.
There are numerous table corals – so called because they are flat and their shape enables the hard corals to put the largest surface area into the sunlight which gets down to them through the water and thus gain maximum food.
Underneath Table Corals, one usually finds fish hiding from predators or hiding so that they can dart out and eat smaller fish as they unsuspectingly pass by.
Fish life teams around the coral blocks
and larger fish prowl around looking for food
Pairs of Nemos live in their own Anemone homes
and here we have a long sweep of different anemone clumps each lived in by a Nemo pair, often with juveniles. This sweep is about 3 metres tall and is one of the longest we have seen.
Morays live on the bottom and here, its personal Cleaner Fish can be seen near its mouth – the Moray does not eat it because it cleans its teeth and tends to any wounds it gets. Any other small fish which passes too close to the open mouth gets grabbed.
Soft and hard corals grow together
and because the site is not very deep, there is no clear demarcation between the shallower depths where hard corals live and the depths where soft corals are predominant.
This is a beautiful site and is well worth a gentle explore when the conditions are right. Today there was no current, the last time I was here the current was very strong and making any tour of the pinnacles was extremely difficult, tiring and expensive in air.
No comments:
Post a Comment